The cultural script of “Mother knows best” is powerful—so powerful that it can override a person’s own instincts, experiences, and even evidence of harm. However, that phrase was never meant to be a universal truth. It was meant for mothers who were actually acting in good faith, with wisdom, humility, and love. When a mother is not acting in your best interest, the old saying becomes a trap rather than a comfort. The myth says that mothers are always selfless, that mothers always want what is best for their children, and that mothers are incapable of envy, resentment, or sabotage. However, real human beings—mothers included—carry unresolved trauma, insecurity, jealousy, fear of losing control, resentment toward their children’s opportunities or independence. When those wounds go unexamined, they can distort maternal behavior in ways that are deeply damaging. Narcissistic parents envy and compete with their children’s attractiveness, athletic or intellectual abilities, and other sorts of favorable attention that their children attract. Narcissistic parents make negative comparisons to put their children down. They might compare a child to a sibling, friend, cousin, or even themselves—going on about how spoiled, inferior, or lucky their child is compared to them when they were young. Such behavior stems from the same jealousy and envy that motivates competition. Sadly, many children of narcissists struggle for years or for a lifetime with shame and low self-worth. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

It is important to pay attention to signs that mother is not acting in your best interest. These patterns often show up when a mother feels threatened by her child’s growth, success, or autonomy. One sign is subtle sabotage. When your mother is always undermining your confidence, planting seeds of doubt about your decisions, and discouraging opportunities that would help you grow, your mother may be manipulating you so she can control her child with guilt, threats, and belittling. Some mothers shame their children with name-calling, criticism, undermining, blame, and withholding love. Frequently, they project onto their children their feelings of unworthiness and negative traits, such as attention-seeking or selfishness; characteristics which they disown. At the same time, they ignore, deny, and criticize their children’s feelings and needs, sometimes punishing them for expressing normal emotions, claiming they are too sensitive or weak. Parents often punish by withholding love, creating constant insecurity of self and self-esteem, which can be traumatizing and physical. One of the most painful—and least acknowledged—forms of family betrayal is when a parent aligns with their children’s enemies. This form of betrayal cuts deeper than ordinary conflict because it violates the basic expectation that a parent should protect their child, not align with people who wish them harm. This is not “normal conflict.” It is a sign of a profound role reversal in which the parent’s emotional needs override their protective instincts. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

Several psychological dynamics can push a parent into this kind of betrayal, such as envy and competition. If a parent feels threatened by their child’s independence, success, confidence, relationships, or reputation, they may gravitate toward people who confirm their negative narrative about the child. If a parent feels insecure or criticized, they may seek validation from anyone—even the child’s adversaries—because it temporarily soothes their ego. Some parents offload their own guilt, shame, or failures by projecting them onto the child. Aligning with the child’s enemies becomes a way to reinforce the projection. Like all narcissists, narcissistic parents are prone to brag about themselves, their achievements, their family, and their children. Do not expect narcissistic parents to be involved with their children’s hobbies, goals, or interests unless it is also their goal or interest. They will not take pleasure in their children’s accomplishments or attractiveness except to the extent that it reflects well upon them. If the child is becoming independent, the parent may: join forces with people who undermine the child, spread misinformation, create alliances that keep the child “in their place.” This is about control, not care. Parents who engage in this pattern often share private information with people who dislike their children. Gossip or exaggerate the child’s mistakes, encourage others to “teach the child a lesson,” validate outsiders’ hostility, participate in smear campaigns, use third parties to pressure, shame, or isolate the child. This is not concern. It is collusion. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

This kind of betrayal can create deep mistrust, hypervigilance, confusion about loyalty and safety, difficulty forming secure relationships, a sense of being unprotected in the world, and emotional shock (“How could my own parent do this?”) It is not just hurtful—it is destabilizing. Why does it feel so unthinkable? Because it violates the core expectation of parenthood. A parent should never join forces with someone who wants to harm their child. The lack of unconditional love, acceptance, and emotional connection in childhood leaves a void. Until the children of narcissists accept their narcissistic parents’ limitations and begin to love themselves, they are never free of suffering. They relive the emotional abandonment of their childhood and seek self-worth, validation, and lovability in relationships with abusive and/or emotionally unavailable partners, including drug addicts and narcissists. They may contribute to the problem by reacting as they did as a child to their parents. They continually find fault with themselves because conditional love is all they have ever known. This can lead to lifelong misery because external validation never heals internal shame and emptiness. Healing requires recovery from the codependence and shame acquired in childhood to feel entitled to love and appreciation. Narcissists deny reality and live inside a fantasy world that protects their fragile ego. They distort, renationalize, twist facts, and delude themselves to avoid anything that may chip their armor, which can be so thick that no amount of evidence or argument can get through. Their memories are often faulty, and self-deception can convince them that their altered reality is true. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

Abusers, addicts, and narcissists typically use these defense mechanisms to disown their unacceptable feelings, thoughts, or qualities and assign them to others, either mentally or verbally. The projector says, “It is not me, it is just you!” In doing so, you become the target of a narcissist’s projection: you are the one who is “selfish,” “weak,” and “worthless.” Coping strategies reflect emotional maturity, and projection is considered a primitive defense because it distorts or ignores reality in any attempt to preserve a weak ego. It is reactive without forethought and used by children. When employed by adults, it indicates arrested emotional development. Low self-esteem and shame impair narcissists’ ability to accept responsibility for mistakes and negative feelings. Projecting allows narcissists to accuse others of being the source of the pain and shame they bear make someone else feel the way they do inside. Rather than suffer self-judgment, projection provides a temporary respite from their negative impulses and traits, which they find too uncomfortable to acknowledge. It preserves feelings of innocence and esteem rather than guilt and shame, or at the very least, it preserves a narcissist’s sense of security in maintaining their façade of infallibility. Externalization is like projection in that it is blaming others for your problems rather than taking appropriate responsibility for them, like addicts who blame their drinking or drug use on their partners or job supervisor. Thus, externalizing also makes you feel like a victim.  #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

However, narcissists are not the only people who project and blame. You might think to yourself, “He hates me,” when you hate him or think he is being controlling or judgmental; in other words, you remain blind to your own similar shortcomings or uncomfortable feelings because you are projecting them onto someone else. When it comes to understanding projecting, it is essential to understand that shame has two faces: one with an inflated ego and one that is depressed. When the devalued self is feeling inferior, shame manifests by idealizing others. This is what partners do when they are attracted to and idealize a narcissist. When a person is feeling superior and defending against shame, the grandiose self devalues others by projecting its disowned flaws and negative self-concept. Both devaluation and idealization are commensurate with the severity of shame and associated depression. Shame can make people fluctuate between the superior and inferior positions, but grandiose and vulnerable narcissists are more-or-less static in their respective positions, regardless of reality. Projection can be crazy-making, especially if you experience it for a long time. When you are vulnerable or have impaired self-esteem and weak boundaries or are sensitive about a specific issue, such as your looks, parenting, or intelligence, there is no filter. You introject the projection. Because internally you agree, it sticks like a magnet. Then you react to the shaming and compound your relationship problems. Doing so validates and augments the abuser’s authority, control, and ideas about you. You are sending the message that your partner has power over your self-esteem and the right to approve you. When there is a prohibition against doing something, a dialogue will result whenever the person starts to do it. The inner parent becomes active and says, “No!” in a hard script, “Watch out!” in a threatening one, or “Why do you want that?” in a soft one—usually whatever an actual parent would say in real life. The energy that the inner child had mobilized to do it is then taken over by the inner parent and is used by him to restrain the immaturity. The more the inner child had mobilized to put into it, the more energetic the mature self can become by appropriating this energy. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

Envy is an unpleasant social emotion that arises when we compare ourselves with others in terms of their characteristic and belonging, and we perceive that they surpass us. This emotion of discomfort arises because the result of this upward comparison reveals our shortcomings. Envy is, therefore, a self-conscious emotion indicating a negative self-evaluation, or an inferior self-image with respect to others. The expansive type needs people for the confirmation of his power and of his spurious values. He also needs them as a safety valve for his own self-hate. However, since he has easier recourse to his own resources and greater support for his pride, his needs for others are neither as impelling nor as comprehensive as they are for the self-effacing type. The nature and magnitude of these needs account for basic characteristics in the latter’s expectations of others. While the arrogant-vindictive type primarily expects evil unless he has proof to the contrary, while the truly detached type expects neither good nor bad, the self-effacing type keeps expecting good. On the surface, it looks as though he had an unshakable faith in the essential goodness of humanity. And it is true that he is more open, more sensitive to likable qualities in others. However, the compulsiveness of his expectations makes it impossible for him to be discriminating. He cannot, as a rule, distinguish between genuine friendliness and its many counterfeits. He is too easily bribed by any show of warmth or interest. In addition, his inner dictates tell him that he should like everybody, that he should not be suspicious. Finally, his fear of antagonism and possible fights makes him overlook, discard, minimize, or explain away such traits as lying, crookedness, exploiting, cruelty, and treachery. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

When confronted with the unmistakable evidence of such trends, he is taken by surprise each time; but even so, he refuses to believe in any intent to deceive, humiliate, or exploit. Although he often is, and still more often feels, abused, this does not change his basic expectations. Even though by bitter personal experience he may know that nothing good could possibly come to him from a particular group or person, he still persists in expecting it—consciously or unconsciously. Particularly when such blindness occurs in someone who is otherwise psychologically astute, his friends or colleagues may be flabbergasted by it. However, it simply indicates that the emotional needs are so great that they override evidence. The more he expects of people, the more he tends to idealize them. He has not, therefore, a real faith in mankind but a Pollyanna attitude which inevitably brings with it many disappointments and makes him more insecure with people. What does he expect of others? In the first place, he must feel accepted by others. He needs such acceptance in whatever form it is available: attention, approval, gratitude, affection, sympathy, love, and pleasures of the flesh. To make it clear, just as in our civilization, many people feel worth as much as the money they are “making,” so the self-effacing type measures his values in the currency of love, using the word here as a comprehensive term for the various forms of acceptance. He is worth as much as he is liked, needed, wanted, or loved. Furthermore, he needs human contact and company because he cannot stand being alone for any length of time. As if he were cut off from life, he feels easily lost. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

Painful as this feeling is, it can still be tolerable as long as his self-abuse keeps within limits. As soon, however, as self-accusations or self-contempt becomes acute, his feeling lost may grow into a nameless terror, and it is exactly at this point that the need for others becomes frantic. This need for company is all the greater since being alone means to him proof of being unwanted and unliked and is therefore a disgrace, to be kept secret. It is a disgrace to go alone to the movies or on vacation, and a disgrace to be alone over the weekend, even when others are sociable. This is an illustration of the extent to which his self-confidence is dependent upon somebody caring for him in some way. He also needs others to give meaning and zest to whatever he is doing. The self-effacing type needs someone for whom to sew, cook, or garden, a teacher for whom he can play the piano, patients or clients who rely on him. Besides all this emotional support, however, he needs help and plenty of it. In his own mind, the help he needs stays within most reasonable limits, partly because most of his needs for help are unconscious and partly because he focuses on certain requests for help as though they were isolated and unique: help in getting him a job, in speaking to his landlord, going shopping with or for him, lending him money. Moreover, any wish for help of which he is aware appears to him eminently reasonable because the need behind it is so great. However, when in analysis, we see the total picture, his need for help actually amounts to the expectation that everything will be done for him. Others should supply the initiative, do his work, take the responsibility, give meaning to his life, or take over his life so that he can live through them. When recognizing the whole scope of these needs and expectations, the power which the appeal of love has for the self-effacing type becomes perfectly clear. It is not only a means to allay anxiety; without love, he and his life are without value and without meaning. Love, therefore, is an intrinsic part of the self-effacing solution. In terms of the type’s personal feelings, love becomes as indispensable for him as oxygen is for breathing. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

Naturally, he carries these expectations also into the analytic relationship. In contrast to most expansive types, he is not at all ashamed to ask for help. On the contrary, he may dramatize the needs and his helplessness and plead for help. However, of course, he wants it his own way. He expects, at bottom, a cure through “love.” He may be quite willing to put effort into the analytic work, but, as it turns out later, he is prompted by his hungry expectation that salvation and redemption must and can come only from without (here from the analyst)—through being accepted. He expects the analyst to remove his feelings of guilt by love, which may mean by sexual love in the case of an analyst of the opposite gender. More often, it means in more general ways, signs of friendship, special attention, or interest. As always happens in neurosis, needs turn into claims, which means that he feels entitled to having all these goods come to him. The need for love, affection, understanding, sympathy, or help turns into: “I am entitled to love, affection, understanding, sympathy. I am entitled to have things done for me. I am entitled not to the pursuit of happiness but to have happiness fall into my lap.” It does almost without saying that these claims—as claims—remain more unconscious than in the expansive type. For the growth of autonomy, a firmly developed early trust is necessary. An individual must be sure that his faith in himself and in the world will not be jeopardized by the violent wish to have his choice, to appropriate demandingly, and to eliminate stubbornly. Only parental firmness can protect him against the consequences of his as yet untrained discrimination and circumspection. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

However, his environment must also back him up in his wish to “stand on his own feet,” while protecting him against the now newly emerging pair of estrangements, namely, that sense of having exposed himself prematurely and foolishly which we call shame or that secondary mistrust, that “double take,” which we call doubt—doubt in himself and doubt in the firmness and perspicacity of his trainers. Shame is an infantile emotion insufficiently studied because in our civilization, it is so early and easily absorbed by guilt. Shame supposes that one is completely exposed and conscious of being looked at—in a word, self-conscious. One is visible and not ready to be visible; that is why in dreams of shame, we are stared at in a condition of incomplete dress, in night attire, “with one’s pants down.” Shame is early expressed in an impulse to bury one’s face or to sink, right then and there, into the ground. This potentiality is abundantly utilized in the educational method of “shaming” used so exclusively by some primitive peoples, where it supplants the often more destructive sense of guilt. The destructiveness of shaming is balanced in some civilizations by devices for “saving face.” Shaming exploits the increased sense of being small, which paradoxically develops as the individual comes to understand his size and power. Too much shaming does not result in a sense of propriety but in a secret determination to try to get away with things when unseen, if, indeed, it does not result in deliberate shamelessness. There is an impressive American ballad in which a murderer, to be hanged on the gallows before the eyes of the community, instead of feeling mortally afraid or totally shamed, begins to berate the onlookers, ending every salvo of defiance with the words, “God damn your eyes.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

Many people, when shamed beyond endurance, may be in a mood (although not in possession of either the courage or the words) to express defiance in similar terms. There is a limit to an individual’s endurance in the face of demands which force him to consider himself, his body, his needs, and his wishes as evil and dirty, and to believe in the infallibility of those who pass such judgment. Occasionally, he may turn things around, because secretly oblivious to the opinions of others, and consider as evil only the fact that they exist: this chance will come when they are gone or when he can leave them. The psychiatric danger of this stage is, as it is at all other stages, the potential aggravation of the normative estrangement to the point where it will cause neurotic or psychotic tendencies. The sensitive individual may turn all his urges to discriminate against himself and thus develop a precocious conscience. Instead of willfully appropriating things in order to test them by repetitive investigation, he will become obsessed by his own repetitiveness and will want to have everything “just so,” and only in a given sequence and tempo. By such an obsessiveness and procrastination, or by becoming a stickler for ritualistic repetitions, the individual then learns to gain power over his superiors in areas where he could not find large-scale mutual regulation with them. Such a hollow victory is how compulsion neurosis develops. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

The most common sign of excessive defensiveness is frequent experiences of threat. If other people must be careful about what they say or do in your presence, it can signify that they sense the grasp of your identity is frail indeed. If you are easily upset by criticism or frightened by your anger or sensuality, it may signify that you are trying to live up to some glorified image. The time to grow—to begin to let go of one’s present self-concept—is evidenced by boredom, failure, and anxiety. These experiences signify that you and your real self have changed, but that your self-structure has not. You are impersonating an identity that, up to yesterday, may have been authentic and life-giving. Now, however, it is not. To start a growth episode is frightening, but it need not be terrifying. All it means is that you may have to suspend your usual activities and relationships in order to get a fresh perspective on your own possibilities and the possibilities of changing some aspects of your life. If you meditate or retreat to a quiet place from time to time, the chances are that you change aspects of your activity and your self-structure more or less frequently. If, however, you are “locked into” various roles, and a fixed way of being yourself, the experience of threat may be more acute when it happens, and the prospect of change more frightening. If your present identity is not sustaining a rewarding and health-engendering life, and you do not see ways to grow and change, then it might be valuable to find a personal counselor or psychotherapist. Conversations with a professional person can frequently lead to growth-producing changes that are neither drastic nor destructive. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

God’s revelation in Jesus Christ, God’s revelation of His love, precedes all our love towards Him. Love has its origin not in us but in God. Love is not an attitude of men but an attitude of God. “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (I John 4.10). Only in Jesus Christ do we know what love is, namely, in His deed for us. “Hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid down his life for us” (I John 3.16). And even here there is given no general definition of love, in the sense, for example, of its being the laying down of one’s life for the lives of others. What is here called love is not this general principle but the utterly unique event of the laying down of the life of Jesus Christ for us. Love is inseparably bound up with the name of Jesus Christ as the revelation of God. The New Testament answers the question, “What is love?” quite unambiguously by pointing solely and entirely to Jesus Christ. He is the only definition of love. However, again, if we were to derive a general definition of love from our view of Jesus Christ and of His deed and His suffering, it would be a complete misunderstanding. Love is not what He suffers. Love is always He Himself. Love is always God Himself. Love is always the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. When all our ideas and principles relating to love are concentrated in the strictest possible manner upon the name of Jesus Christ, this must, above all, not be allowed to reduce this name to a mere abstract concept. This name must always be understood in the full concrete significance of the historical reality of a living man. And so, without in any way contradicting what has been said so far, it is only the concrete action and suffering of this man Jesus Christ which will make it possible to understand what love is. The name Jesus Christ, in which God reveals Himself, gives the explanation of itself in the life and words of Jesus Christ. For, after all, the New Testament does not consist in an endless repetition of the name of Jesus Christ, but that which this name comprises is displayed in events, concepts, and principles which are intelligible to use. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

And so, too, the choice of the concept of “love,” is not simply arbitrary; this concept acquires an entirely new connotation in the New Testament message, yet it is not entirely without connection with what we understand by “love” in our own language. Certainly, it is not true to say that the biblical concept of love is a particular form of what we have already, in general, understood by this word. Precisely the opposite turns out to be the case, namely, that the biblical concept of love, and it alone is, the foundation, truth and the reality of love, in the sense that any natural thought about love contains truth and reality only in so far as it participates in this its origin, that is to say, in the love which is God Himself in Jesus Christ. Therefore, love is the reconciliation of man with God in Jesus Christ. The disunion of men with God, with other men, with the world and with themselves, is at an end. Man’s origin is given back to him. Love is the name for what God does to man in overcoming the disunion in which man lives. This deed of God is Jesus Christ, is reconciliation. And so love is something which happens to man, something passive, something over which he does not himself dispose, simply because it lies beyond his existence in disunion. Love means the undergoing of the transformation of one’s entire existence by God; it means being drawn in into the world as it lives and must live before God and in God. Love, therefore, is not man’s choice, but it is the election of man by God. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

Only too soon personal experience and the experience of others teaches how far most men’s lives are from being what a man’s life ought to be. All have great moments. They see themselves in the magic mirror of possibility which hope holds before them while the wish flatters them. However, they swiftly forget this sight in the daily round of things. Or perhaps, they talk enthusiastic words, “for the tongue is a little member and boasteth great things.” However, talk takes the name of enthusiasm in vain by proclaiming loudly from the housetop what it should work out in silence. And in the midst of the trivial details of life, these enthusiastic words are quickly forgotten. It is forgotten that such a thing was said of this man. It is forgotten that it was he himself who said it. Now and then, perhaps, memory wakens with horror, and remorse seems to promise new strength. However, alas, this, too, lasts only for a good-sized moment. All of them have intentions, plans, resolutions for life, yes, for eternity. However, the intention soon loses its youthful strength and fades away. The resolution is not firmly grounded and is unable to withstand opposition. It totters before circumstances and is altered by them. Memory, too, has a way of failing, until by common practice and habit, they learn to draw sympathy from one another. If someone proclaims the slender comfort that excuses yield, instead of realizing how treacherous is such sympathy, they finally come to regard it as edifying, because it encourages and strengthens indolence. Now, there are men who find it edifying that the demand to will one thing be asserted in all its sublimity, in all its severity, so that it may press its claim into the innermost fastness of the soul. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

Others find it edifying that a wretched compromise should be made between God, the claim, and the language used. There are men who find it edifying ig only someone will challenge them. However, there are also the sleepy souls who regard it as not only pleasing, but even edifying, to be lulled to sleep. This is indeed a lamentable fact; but there is a wisdom which is not from above, but is earthly and fleshly and devilish. It has discovered this common human weakness and indolence; it wants to be helpful. It perceives that all depends upon the will, and so it proclaims loudly, “Unless it wills one thing, a man’s life is sure to become one of wretched mediocrity, of pitiful misery. He must will one thing regardless of whether it be good or bad. He must will one thing for therein lies a man’s greatness.” Yet it is not difficult to see through this powerful error. As to the working out of salvation, the holy Scripture teaches that sin is the corruption of man. Salvation, therefore, lies only in the purity with which a man wills the Good. That very earthly and devilish cleverness distorts this into a temptation to perdition; weakness is a man’s misfortune; strength the sole salvation: “When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry and empty places but finds no rest. Then he turns back again and now he brings with him” that unclean cleverness, the wisdom of the desert and the empty places, that unclean cleverness—that now drives out the spirit of indolence and of mediocrity “so that the last stage become worse than the first.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

Everything that happens to us has merit, whether we recognize the significance of it or not. Everything in our lives ultimately leads us somewhere. However, to envy anyone for the things which they have is not a noble thing to do. Envy is the cause of much trouble and should be avoided. However, we cannot help, at times, thinking that we would like to have some of these things which others possess and which, for some reason or other, we do not have. Then, again, there is much truth in the fact that if we envy someone else, we may, by that envy, be spurred on to do greater work so that we may acquire them. It is not harmful, in this way, to look around and find someone to envy—or we might say, to emulate. Such reflections on envy remind us that it is not merely a moral inclination but a distinct emotional state, one that engages the deeper mechanisms of human feeling. To understand its force, we must consider the broader principles governing emotion itself. The fundamental proposition, respecting Emotion generally, may be expressed in these words: The state of Feeling, or the subjective consciousness which is known to each person by his own experience, is associated with a diffusive action over the system, through the medium of the cerebral hemispheres. In other words, the physical fact that accompanies and supports the mental fact, without making or constituting that fact, is an agitation of all the bodily members more immediately allied with the brain by the nervous communication. The organs first affected, by a wave of nervous influence emanating from the brain, are the moving members. Some of these are more readily agitated than others—for example the features of the face; which therefore constitute the principal medium of the expression of feeling. However, observation shows that all parts of the moving system are liable to be affected by an emotional wave: while a very important series of effects is produced upon the secreting and excreting apparatus of the body. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

The coincidence of a state of mental excitement with bodily agitation is one of the most common experiences of human nature. In children, with whom no influence is as yet at work to suppress the free play of emotion, the coincidence may be produced invariable. Every stimulus, whether of pleasure or of pain, animates the features, the vocal organs, and the whole moving system. In pain, the lachrymal section is profusely poured out. So constant is the accompaniment of bodily excitement with mental, that the one is always looked upon as sufficient evidence of the other. In advancing years, there is a process of education, as well as an exercise of the will, tending to check and suppress the bodily manifestations of feeling, especially those of a more violent nature; but in cases where the suppressive influence is suspended, or where the strength of the passion breaks through the artificial barriers, the characteristics of infancy are reproduced in all their fullness. The observed agreement of bodily agitation with states of pleasure or pain is borne out by noting that the two rise and fall together in degree or intensity. Exactly as we increase a pleasurable or painful stimulus, we find the diffused expression of the bodily organs becomes more energetic. The hardly perceptible smile rises to the animated distension of all the features, and at last convulses and agitates every member into ecstatic violence. A link of causation is in this way shown to exist between feeling and bodily activity; so that in cases where no bodily excitement is shown, we presume either that the feeling is too weak to produce an effect sufficient to catch the eye of a beholder, or that some restraining power is at work. It must be in the nature of a state of emotion to cause the brain to diffuse or transmit currents to the various muscles and secreting organs; although up to a certain point of strength these do not show any sensible agitation. As soon as the agitation becomes apparent, we find it growing stronger with each addition to the moving cause. Everyone knows in their own consciousness that extreme intensity of the feeling itself, and that even on occasion where nothing is allowed to appear to others, there is nevertheless a diffused flutter and thrill accompanying any state of acute excitement. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

Recognizing envy as one instance of the broader emotional life, we may now observe how any feeling, once awakened, exerts its influence upon the whole system. As soon as the agitation becomes apparent, we find it growing stronger with each addition to the moving cause. Envy can become so strong that it overpowers a person and turns them into a different being than they typically are. To further highlight this illustration, it is well-known fact that in the heat of battle, wounds are for a time unfelt. The engrossment of the brain and bodily system is so entire that the stimulus of a sharp wound is unable to diffuse itself, and consciousness or feeling is not produced. So when the attention is strongly fixed upon one object, other impressions falling upon the senses have no effect; the sensory organ is excited, but the free diffusion through the brain and over the system is obstructed by the bent already imparted to the nervous currents. On this fact is founded one of many devices for alleviating pain, which is to engage the attention on some new class of objects. Whatever the impression be that determines the general attitude of the bodily framework, the same impression prevails in the inner consciousness. When the attention is released from something that has strongly occupied it, the recent impressions made on the sense begin to become conscious; as when a person gives no heed to words addressed to him, and after a minute or two suddenly wakes up to their import. From these examples, we may observe how envy can so completely possess the brain, the body, and the emotional nature that one becomes, for the time, incapable of perceiving another being as an object of affection. The passion gathers such force that the love which once existed can no longer penetrate the hardened armor of jealousy, and the mind, thus clouded, mistakes its own agitation for just cause of resentment. Yet, when the envied person is removed from one’s immediate sphere, the tumult often subsides; and in the stillness that follows, remorse awakens. One then begins to recall, with painful clarity, the love that had been offered and to feel the weight of guilt for having been insensible to it. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

Some individuals are particularly susceptible to jealousy, and under the sway of the repetition‑compulsion, they are driven to relive, as a present reality, what has long been repressed. The earlier neurosis does not vanish; it merely returns in altered form, emerging as a fresh transference neurosis. This compulsion to repeat arises from the repressed element in the unconscious, which presses for expression whenever the person perceives a threat—whether real or imagined—in another individual or situation. Yet envy, though rooted in such deep psychological mechanisms, may still be moderated by deliberate reflection. We may cure much of it in ourselves by considering how trivial, burdensome, or ill‑suited are the things for which we envy our neighbor, or by recognizing that we already possess goods equal to those we covet. If I envy another’s greatness, I may recall that he lacks my quiet; I may even suspect that he envies me as much as I do him. And when I examine his perfections with exactness and balance them against my own, I often find that my condition is no less tolerable than his. Indeed, though many indulge envy, very few would truly exchange their lot for that of the person they resent, once all circumstances are weighed. We ought therefore to guard ourselves against every appearance of envy, for it is a passion that always implies a sense of inferiority wherever it resides. The envious person suffers precisely at those moments that ought to bring him pleasure, for another’s joy becomes his torment. The relish of his life is inverted; and the objects which administer the highest satisfaction to those who are exempt from this passion give the quickest pangs to persons who are subject to it. All the perfections of their fellow-creatures are odious. Youth, beauty, valor, and wisdom are provocations of their displeasure. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

What a wretched and apostate state this is to be offended with excellence, and to hate a man because we prove him! The condition of the envious man is the most emphatically miserable; he is not only incapable of rejoicing in another’s merit or success, but lives in a world wherein all mankind are in a plot against his quiet, by studying their own happiness and advantage. He who holds himself down, shrinking in stature lest he make any expansive motion, unwittingly prepares the very soil in which his envy takes root and festers. Moreover, he feels subdued by an ever-alive readiness to accuse and despise himself; he also feels easily frightened and spends a good deal of his energies in assuaging all these painful feelings. This developmental crisis is evoked by the necessity to manage encounters. A new sense of estrangement is awakened along with the awareness of new dependences and new familiarities. Envy is a type of infantile simplicity. It is a sense of “hallowed presence” which remains basic in neurotic adults in our society who have a desire for safety. Their reaction is often to unknown, psychological dangers in a world that is perceived to be hostile, overwhelming, and threatening. Such a person behaves as if a great catastrophe were almost always impending, id est, he is usually responding as if to an emergency. His very security rests upon being the center of attention, upon having and being “the best,” and upon looking down with condescension upon others, their belongings, and their accomplishments. This type of neurotic adult may be said to behave as if he were actually afraid of a spanking, or of his mother’s disapproval, or of being abandoned by his parents, or having his food taken away from him. It is as if his childish attitudes of fear and threat reaction to a dangerous world had gone underground, and, untouched by the growing-up and learning processes, were now ready to be called out by any stimulus that would make a child feel endangered or threatened. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

The neurosis in which the search for safety takes its clearest form is in the compulsive-obsessive neurosis. Compulsive-obsessives try frantically to order and stabilize the world so that no unmanageable, unexpected, or unfamiliar dangers will ever appear. They hedge themselves about with all sorts of ceremonials, rules, and formulas so that every possible contingency may be provided for and so that no new contingencies may appear. They resemble the brain‑injured patients described by Goldstein, who preserve their equilibrium only by avoiding everything unfamiliar and by arranging their restricted world with such meticulous order that nothing unpredictable can intrude. When this defensive rigidity appears in psychologically intact individuals, it may manifest as attempts to control, diminish, or socially demote others—undermining their standing, damaging their reputation, devaluing their achievements, or even terminating a life—in order to preserve a sense of superiority and maintain a tightly ordered inner world. Envy then becomes a pathological need for omnipotent control. Pathological controls must be established to serve as a basis of comparison. This is due to the dread of losing one’s audience, and certainly, that they will leave unless he can continuously establish his dominance, and the only way he can do that is by keeping others down, making them look bad and bragging about his importance and material objects. Even when a person is no longer in his circle, a person suffering from the pathological need for omnipotent control will still try to destroy one he truly believes is better than him. They try to arrange the world so that anything unexpected (dangers) cannot possibly occur. If, through no fault of their own, something unexpected does occur, like someone they envy finding success, they go into a panic reaction as if this unexpected occurrence constituted a grave danger. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

Each successive stage and crisis has a special relation to one of the basic institutionalized endeavors of man for the simple reason that the human life cycle and human institutions have evolved together. The relation between them is twofold: each generation brings to these institutions the remnants of infantile needs and youthful fervor, and receives from them—as long as they, indeed, manage to maintain their institutional vitality—a specific reinforcement of childlike vitality. If one can overcome envy, it becomes possible to pierce the universal amnesia that conceals the frightening aspects of childhood. In relinquishing envy, we loosen the defenses that keep those early terrors unexamined. Yet we may also gratefully acknowledge that the principal glory of childhood survives into adult life: the capacity for wonder, for spontaneous joy, and for a trust in life that, though often obscured, is never wholly extinguished. Trust, then, becomes the capacity for faith—a vital need for which man must find some institutional confirmation. Religion, it seems, is the oldest and has been the most lasting institution to serve the ritual restoration of a sense of trust in the form of faith while offering a tangible formula for a sense of evil against which it promises to arm and defend man. Childlike strength as well as a potential for infantilization are suggested in the fact that all religious practices include periodic childlike surrender to the Power that creates and re-creates, dispensing earthly fortune as well as spiritual well-being; the demonstration of smallness and dependence by reduced posture and humble gesture; the confession in prayer and song of misdeeds, misthoughts, and evil intentions and the fervent appeal for inner reunification by divine guidance. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

At best, all of this is highly stylized and thus becomes suprapersonal; individual trust becomes a common faith, individual mistrust a commonly formulated evil, while the individual’s plea for restoration becomes part of the ritual practice of many and a sign of trustworthiness in the community. When religion loses its actual power of presence, then, it would seem, an age must find other forms of joint reverence for life which derive vitality from a shared world image. Only a reasonably coherent framework provides the faith which is transmitted by the mothers to the infants in a way conducive to the vital strength of hope, that is, the enduring predisposition to believe in the attainability of primal wishes in spite of the anarchic urges and rages of dependency. The shortest formulation of the identity gain of earliest childhood may well be: I am what hope I have and give. For some, the promises of celibacy and obedience made in life can be said to relieve them of their burdens which they are not ready to assume. Sometimes, it takes a kind of shock therapy for God to change one’s mind. Others have said that Christ himself spoke. The spiritual part of the experience can also be an intra-psychic one. Martin Luther, for instance, records that something in him made him pronounce a vow before the rest of him knew what he was saying. His friends’ conviction that he was acting under God’s guidance was based on nothing but their impressions of the genuineness of his inner life. For some, celibacy provides a divine preservation tied to personal sacrifice.  God is sustaining their life in recognition of their vow of celibacy. Although some individuals disparage celibacy out of ignorance or envy, the practice itself belongs to a long and well‑established tradition in which human life is interpreted through the framework of sacred commitment. Within this tradition, celibacy functions not as a denial of life but as a structured mode of meaning‑making, providing containment, purpose, and a sense of continuity with a larger spiritual order. For men who have embraced celibacy in earnest, even an ordinary thunderstorm may be interpreted as a direct intervention of Providence, directed toward them with deliberate intent. Such individuals exhibit a form of conviction that is not merely doctrinal but existential, and they stand as honest representatives of an earlier moral epoch—one in which personal vows, divine agency, and the ordering of one’s life under a sacred mandate were experienced with an immediacy seldom encountered in the modern mind. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

One cannot examine the psychological life of the individual without eventually confronting the larger question of how personal ethics relate to the structures of collective life. For if private convictions, vows, and defenses shape the individual’s conduct, we must ask what relation such ethical formations bear to the sphere of political action. Now then, what relations do ethics and politics actually have? Have the two nothing whatever to do with one another, as has occasionally been said? Or is the reverse true: that the ethic of political conduct is identical with that of any other conduct? Occasionally, an exclusive choice has been believed to exist between the two propositions—either the one or the other proposition must be correct. However, is it true that any ethic of the world could establish commandments of identical content for erotic, business, familial, and official relations; for the relations to one’s wife, to the greengrocer, the son, the competitor, the friend, the defendant? Should it really matter so little for the ethical demands on politics that politics operates with very special means, namely, power backed by violence? Do we not see that the Bolshevik and the Spartacist ideologists bring about exactly the same results as any militaristic dictator, just because they use these political means? In what but the persons of the power-holders and their dilettantism does the rule of the workers’ and the soldiers’ councils differ from the rule of any power-holder of the old regime? In what way does the polemic of most representatives of the presumably new ethic differ from that of the opponents which the criticized, or the ethic of any other demagogues? In their noble intention, people will say. Good! However, it is the means about which we speak here, and the adversaries, in complete subjective sincerity, claim, in the very same way, that their ultimate intentions are of lofty character. “All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword,” and fighting is everywhere fighting. Hence, the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

By the Sermon on the Mount, we mean the absolute ethic of the gospel, which is a more serious matter than those who are fond of quoting these commandments today believe. This ethic is no joking matter. The same holds true for this ethic as has been said of causality in science: it is not a cab, which one can have stopped at one’s pleasure; it is all or nothing. If trivialities are not to result, this is precisely the meaning of the gospel. Hence, for instance. It was said of the wealthy young man, “He went away sorrowful: for he had great possessions.” The evangelist commandment, however, is unconditional and unambiguous: give what thou hast—absolutely everything. The politician will say that this is a socially senseless imposition as long as it is not carried out everywhere. Thus, the politician upholds taxation, confiscatory taxation, outright confiscation; in a word, compulsion and regulation for all. The ethical commandment, however, is not all concerned about that, and this unconcern is its essence. Or, take the example, “turn the other cheek”; This command is unconditional and does not question the source of the other’s authority to strike. Except for a stain, it is an ethic of indignity. This is it: one must be saintly in everything; at least in intention, one must live like Jesus Christ, the apostles, St. Francis, and their like. Then this ethic makes sense and expresses a kind of dignity; otherwise, it does not. For if it is said, in line with the acosmic ethic of love, “Resist not him that is evil with force,” for the politician, the reverse proposition holds, “thou shalt resist evil by force,” or else you are responsible for the evil winning out. He who wishes to follow the ethic of the gospel should abstain from strikes, for strikes mean compulsion; he may join the company unions. Above all things, he should not talk of “revolution.” After all, the ethic of the gospel does not wish to teach that civil war is the only legitimate war. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

The pacifist who follows the gospel will refuse to bear arms or will throw them down; in Germany, this was the recommended ethical duty to end the war and therewith all wars. The politician would say the only sure means to discredit the war for all foreseeable time would have been a status quo peace. Then, the nations would have questioned, what was this war for? And then, the way would have been argued ad absurdum, which is now impossible. For the victors, at least for part of them, the war will have been politically profitable. And the responsibility for this rests on the behavior that made all resistance impossible for us. Now, as a result of the ethics of absolutism, when the period of exhaustion will have passed, the peace will be discredited, not the war. Finally, let us consider the duty of truthfulness. For the absolute ethic it holds unconditionally. Hence, the conclusion was reached to publish all documents, especially those placing blame on one’s own country. On the basis of these one-sided publications, the confessions of guilt followed—and they were one-sided, unconditional, and without regard to consequences. The politician will find that, as a result, truth will not be furthered but certainly obscured through abuse and unleashing of passion; only an all-round methodical investigation by non-partisans could bear fruit; any other procedure may have consequences for a nation that cannot be remedied for decades. However, the absolute ethic just does not ask for “consequences.” That is the decisive point. We must be clear about the fact that all ethically oriented conduct may be guided by one of two fundamentally differing and irreconcilably opposed maxims: conduct can be oriented to an “ethic of ultimate ends” or to an “ethic of responsibility.” This is not to say that an ethic of ultimate ends is identical with irresponsibility, or that an ethic of responsibility is identical with unprincipled opportunism. Naturally, nobody says that. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

However, there is an abysmal contrast between conduct that follows the maxim of an ethic of ultimate ends—that is, in religious terms. “The Christian does rightly and leaves the results with the Lord”—and conduct that follows the maxim of an ethic of responsibility, in which case one has to give an account of the foreseeable results of one’s action. You may demonstrate to a convinced syndicalist, believing in an ethic of ultimate ends, that his action will result in increasing the opportunities of reaction, in increasing the oppression of his class, and obstructing its ascent—and you will not make the slightest impression upon him. If an action of good intent leads to bad results, then, in the actor’s eyes, not he but the world, or the stupidity of other men, or God’s will, who made them thus, is responsible for the evil. However, a man who believes in an ethic of responsibility takes account of precisely the average deficiencies of people; as Fichte has correctly said, he does not even have the right to presuppose their goodness and perfection. He does not feel in a position to burden others with the results of his own actions so far as he was able to foresee them; he will say: these results are ascribed to my action. The believer in an ethic of ultimate ends feels “responsible” only for seeing to it that the flame of pure intentions is not quelched: for example, the flame of protesting against the injustice of the social order. To rekindle the flame ever anew is the purpose of his quite irrational deeds, judged in view of their possible success. They are acts that can and shall have only exemplary value. However, even herewith the problem is not yet exhausted. No ethics in the world can dodge the fact that in numerous instances, the attainment of “good” ends is bound to the fact that one must be willing to pay the price of using morally dubious means or at least dangerous ones—and facing the possibility or even the probability of evil ramifications. From no ethics in the world can it be concluded when and to what extent the ethically good purpose “justifies” the ethically dangerous means and ramifications. Public debates often illustrate this dilemma. Some argue, for example, that permissive immigration policies are motivated by the ethically laudable aim of offering individuals from other countries the possibility of a better life. Yet the practical ramifications of such policies are contested. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

Reports have documented criminal incidents involving certain migrant groups, including a widely publicized case in Aurora, Colorado, where alleged members of a Venezuelan gang were involved in armed home invasions and kidnappings within an apartment complex. There are also reports of violent crime, murder, and sexual assault increasing. As well as billions of dollars in fraud. Furthermore, the billions of dollars in costs to accommodate these people left American citizens victims of crime and caused them to go without the government services that they needed.  The decisive means for politics is violence. You may see the extent of the tension between means and ends, when viewed ethically, from the following: as is generally known, even during the war, the revolutionary socialists (Zimmerwald faction) professed a principle that one might strikingly formulate: “If we face the choice either of some more years of war and then the revolution, or peace now and no revolution, we choose—some more years of war!” Upon the further question: “What can this revolution bring about?” Every scientifically trained socialist would have had the answer: One cannot speak of a transition to an economy that, in our sense, could be called socialist; a bourgeois economy will re-emerge, merely stripped of the feudal elements and the dynastic vestiges. For this very modest result, they are willing to face “some more years of war.” One may well say that even with a very robust socialist conviction, one might reject a purpose that demands such means. With Bolshevism and Separatism, and, in general, with any kind of revolutionary socialism, it is precisely the same thing. It is, of course, utterly ridiculous if the power politicians of the old regime are morally denounced for their use of the same means, however justified the rejection of their aims may be. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

Thus, the inconsistency of denouncing the old regime for employing means that the revolutionaries themselves do not hesitate to adopt is but one instance of a broader historical irony. The same divergence between moral intention and practical necessity that vitiates their political conduct also frustrates the very historical vocation which Marx, with such confidence, attributed to the proletariat. The revolutionary bourgeoisie seized power in 1789 because they already had it. At this period, legality, as Jules Monnerot says, was lagging behind the facts. The facts were that the bourgeoisie were already in possession of the posts of command and of the new power: money. The proletariat was not at all in the same position, having only their poverty and their hopes, and being kept in their condition of misery by the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie class debased itself by a mania for production and material power, while the very organization of this mania made the creation of an elite impossible. However, criticism of this organization and the development of rebel conscience could, on the contrary, forge a reserve elite. Only revolutionary trade unionism, with Pelloutier and Sorel, embarked on this course and wanted to create, by professional and cultural education, new cadres for which a world without honor was calling, and still class. However, that could not be accomplished in a day, and the new masters were already on the scene, interested in making immediate use of human unhappiness for the sake of happiness in the distant future, rather than in relieving as much and as soon as possible the suffering of millions of men. The authoritarian socialists deemed that history was going too slowly and that it was necessary, in order to hurry it on, to entrust the mission of the proletariat to a handful of doctrinaires. For that very reason, they have been the first to deny this mission. Nevertheless, it exists, not in the exclusive sense that Marx gives it, but in the sense that a mission exists for any human group which knows how to derive pride and fecundity from its labors and its sufferings. So that it can manifest itself, however, a risk must be taken and confidence put in working-class freedom and spontaneity. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

Authoritarian socialism, on the contrary, has confiscated this living freedom for the benefit of an ideal freedom, which is yet to come. In so doing, whether it wished to our not, it reinforced the attempt at enslavement begun by industrial capitalism. By the combined action of these two factors and during a hundred and fifty years, except in the Paris of the Commune, which was the last refuge of rebel revolution, the proletariat has had no other historical mission but to be betrayed. The workers fought and died to give power to the military or to intellectuals who dreamed of becoming military and who would enslave them in their turn. This struggle, however, has been the source of their dignity, a fact that is recognized by all who have chosen to share their aspirations and their misfortunes. However, this dignity has been acquired in opposition to the whole clan of old and new masters. At the very moment when they dare to make use of it, it denies them. In one sense, it announces their eclipse. A similar pattern may be observed in the fate of those who, in our own time, undertake the perilous task of exposing institutional misconduct. Their dignity, acquired through long resistance to the dominion of old and new masters, is acknowledged by all who share their burdens. Yet the instant they dare to assert the moral authority their struggle has earned, the institutions they confront hasten to repudiate them—thereby announcing, however unwillingly, the waning of their own legitimacy. This frightening experience, with whatever lessons in bravery, cunning, and skill it yields, is firmly sedimented in the consciousness of the individuals who went through it. If the experience is shared by several individuals, it will be sedimented intersubjectively and may perhaps even form a profound bond between these individuals. As this experience is designated and transmitted linguistically, however, it becomes accessible and, perhaps, strongly relevant to individuals who have never gone through it. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

To further illustrate this dynamic, multiple Boeing employees have come forward in recent years with serious concerns about aircraft manufacturing and safety practices. Their disclosures were made under conditions of intense pressure, fear of retaliation, and, in some cases, personal danger. Those who spoke out developed a tight, intersubjective bond, for only they fully grasped the risks involved in challenging a major aerospace manufacturer. One of the most prominent figures, John Barnett, had served as a quality manager at Boeing for more than thirty years. He first filed a whistleblower complaint in 2017—one year before the first 737 MAX crash—alleging that the company’s quality‑control systems were severely inadequate. Barnett reported that faulty parts and substandard manufacturing practices were being overlooked, potentially compromising flight safety. Another whistleblower, Joshua Dean, likewise raised concerns about manufacturing defects. Both men died suddenly in 2024—Dean from a severe bacterial infection and Barnett from what authorities ruled a self‑inflicted gunshot wound. Their allegations helped catalyze ongoing investigations and legal scrutiny, brought into sharp public focus when the door plug of an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX 9 detached mid‑flight in January. Since that incident, more than one hundred additional whistleblowers have contacted the Federal Aviation Administration, demonstrating how an initially private ordeal can, once articulated and transmitted publicly, become a matter of collective concern and cultural significance. Such testimony does more than record a private ordeal; it objectifies the experience in language and thereby transforms it into a publicly available form of knowledge. Once articulated, the whistleblower’s experience can be incorporated into a wider moral and cultural tradition—invoked in debates about corporate responsibility, used as material for ethical instruction, or taken up in journalism, documentary storytelling, and public inquiry. In this way, both the immediate experience and its broader symbolic meanings become transmissible to new generations, and even to communities far removed from the aerospace industry, each of which may attach its own significance to the narrative. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

In this way, the objectified experience becomes part of the moral and psychological vocabulary through which individuals make sense of upheaval. And just as communities assimilate the lessons of others’ ordeals, individuals themselves often require a comparable jolt before meaningful change can occur. One sees this in those whose inner lives have been shaped by intense religious or ascetic experiences—such as celibate men who, in moments of crisis, report encounters or impressions that they interpret as divine communication. Typically, growth in awareness unfolds gradually, but there are times when only a dramatic rupture can dislodge a person from entrenched defenses. If the person has the courage (and the encouragement) to accept threat and not respond reflexively with mechanisms of defense, growth will go on throughout a person’s life span, even into the seventies and nineties. Properly understood, the experiences of anxiety and dread will evoke the “courage to be” and they will be harbingers of growth to richer existence. Improperly understood, or encouraged in a spirit of timidity, they lead a person to make of the identity an impregnable bastion. The person then leads a safe but often unproductive and joyless life. Courage and encouragers assist them to grow. The courage to grow can sometimes be generated in psychotherapy or in a properly conducted encounter group. Under such conditions, individuals may enlarge their self‑concept, revise their conscience in more humane and mature directions, and present a public self that corresponds more closely to the realities of their own personality and the demands of the situation. These processes can be profoundly life‑preserving. Yet it remains a sobering fact that not everyone reaches this point of transformation. Some individuals, unable to find a setting in which their inner rupture can be metabolized, become martyrs to the very forces they sought to confront. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

Lord Jesus Christ, You who stood for truth when the world preferred silence, look with mercy upon all who dare to speak out against wrongdoing in their workplaces, institutions, and communities. We grieve that so many are willing to risk their careers to do what is harmful or unlawful, while so few are willing to risk their careers to defend what is right. We lament that our society so often protects the powerful at any cost, even when their actions endanger the vulnerable, distort justice, or betray the public trust. Strengthen the whistleblowers who step forward despite fear, retaliation, and isolation; grant them courage, clarity, and the assurance that their sacrifice is not in vain. Bless the work of those who labor to support them—including the mission of this nonprofit, which seeks to advance public understanding, protect truth‑tellers, and cultivate a culture where integrity is honored rather than punished. May Your Gospel inspire us to stand firm in righteousness, to resist complicity, and to uphold justice even when the cost is great. And for those who become martyrs to truth—those whose courage is met not with gratitude but with suffering—grant them peace, and grant us the strength to continue their work with unwavering faith. Amen.

Science grows by accumulation. Discoveries, inventions, and new knowledge, are added to the existing stock. These new elements are usually very small. Inventions, as additions of something new, are seen after analysis to be not nearly so large as they popularly appear to be. An invention is rather a small step in a process growing by small accretions. There are discoveries, big in significance; but their coming is hard to predict and they are rare. The new elements of knowledge are determined in part by the existing elements, and for this reason the addition of a desired element cannot be secured by will-power and enterprise alone. Sometimes your skills and accomplishments were perfect for a previous stage of life, but the current situation demands: more authority, more resources, institutional power, a different type of leverage. When dealing with systems that resist accountability, where personal excellence does not automatically translate into institutional response, this is especially true. Primitive man needed and desired medical progress as much as modern man, and worked at it as arduously; but modern medical achievements are more dependent upon previously existing elements. Existing assets or achievements may be recognized indirectly, but they are not emotionally experienced. “My patients seem to think I am a good doctor.” “My friends say I am a good storyteller.” “Men teachers think I am very intelligent, but they are mistaken.” The same attitude prevails toward financial assets. Such a person may not have the feeling of owning the money he has earned through his own work. If he is financially well off, he nevertheless experiences himself as poor. Any ordinary observation or self-observation lays bare the fears behind all this overmodesty. They emerge as soon as he raises his head. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

Whatever sets the self-minimizing process to work, it is maintained by powerful taboos on trespassing the narrow confines he has set for himself. He should be content with little. He has should not wish or strive for more. Any wish, any striving, any reaching out for more feels to him like a dangerous or reckless challenging fate. He should not want to improve his figure by dieting or gymnastics, or to improve his appearance by dressing better. Last but not least, he should not improve himself by analyzing himself. He may be able to do so when under duress. However, otherwise, he simply will not find the time for it. I am not referring here to individual fears of tackling special problems. There is something beyond these usual difficulties that holds him back from doing it at all. Often, in sharp contrast to his conscious conviction about the value of self-analysis, it appears to him as “selfish” to “waste that much time” on himself. What he scorns as “selfishness” is almost as comprehensive as what he considers “presumptuous.” To him, selfishness includes doing anything that is just for himself. He is often capable of enjoying many things but it would be “selfish” to enjoy them alone. He is often unaware of operating under such taboos and merely deems it “natural” to want to share a joy. Actually, the sharing of pleasures is an absolute must. If it is not shared with somebody else, whether it is food, music, or nature, it loses flavor and meaning. He cannot spend money for himself. His stinginess with personal experiences may reach absurd degrees, which is particularly striking when contrasted with his often lavish spending for others. When he trespasses this taboo and does spend money on himself, even though it may be objectively reasonable, he will become panicky. The same holds true with regard to the use of time and energies. He often cannot read a book in his free time unless it is useful for his work. He may not grant himself the time for writing a personal letter, but furtively squeezes it in between two appointments. He often cannot make or keep order in his personal belongins—unless it is for somebody who would appreciate it. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

Similarly, he may neglect his appearance unless he has a date, a professional or social engagement—id est, again, unless it is for others. Conversely, he may display considerable energy and skill in attaining something for others, such as helping them to make desirable contacts or to get a job; but he is tied hand and foot when it comes to doing the same for himself. Although much hostility is generated in him, he cannot express it except when emotionally upset. Otherwise he is afraid of fighting and even friction for several reasons. Partly, this is because a person who has thus clipped his wings is not and cannot possibly be a good fighter. In part, he is terrified lest anybody be hostile toward him, and prefers to give in, to “understand” and forgive. Consistent with the other taboos and actually implied in them, is one on being “aggressive.” He cannot stand up for his dislike of a person, an idea, a cause—and fight them if necessary. He cannot keep a sustained hostility nor can he carry a grudge, consciously. Hence, vindictive drives remain unconscious and can only be expressed indirectly and in a disguised form. He cannot be openly demanding nor can he reprimand. It is most difficult for him to criticize, to reproach, or to accuse,–even when it seems warranted. He cannot even in joking make a sharp, witty, sarcastic remark. There are taboos on all that is presumptuous, selfish, and aggressive. If we realize in detail the scope covered by the taboos, they constitute a crippling check on the person’s expansion, his capacity for fighting and for defending himself, his self-interest—on anything that might accrue to his growth or his self-esteem. The taboos and self-minimizing constitute a shrinking process that artificially reduced his stature and leaves him feeling like one patient’s dream in which, as a result of some merciless punishment, a person had shrunk to half his bodily size and was reduced to utter destitution and a moronic condition. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

The self-effacing type, then, cannot make any assertive, aggressive, expansive move without trespassing against his taboos. Their violation arouses both his self-condemnation and his self-contempt. He responds either with a general panicky feeling, without special content, or with feeling guilty. If self-contempt is in the foreground, he may respond with a fear of ridicule. Being in his self-feeling so small and so insignificant, any reaching out beyond his narrow confines may easily arouse the fear of ridicule. If this fear is conscious at all, it is usually externalized. If he spoke up in a discussion, ran for office, or had the ambition to write something, others would think it ridiculous. Most of this fear, however, remains unconscious. At any rate, he never seems to be aware of its formidable impact. It is, however, a relevant factor in keeping him down. The fear of ridicule is specifically indicative of self-effacing trends. It is alien to the expansive type. He can be blusteringly presumptuous without even realizing that he might be ridiculous or that others might so regard him. While curtailed in any pursuit on his own behalf, he is not only free to do things for others but, according to his inner dictates, should be the ultimate of helpfulness, generosity, considerateness, understanding, sympathy, love, and sacrifice. In fact, love and sacrifice in his mind are closely intertwined: he should sacrifice everything for love—love is sacrifice. Thus far, the taboos and shoulds have a remarkable consistency. However, sooner or later contradictory trends appear. We might naively expect that this type would rather abhor aggressive, arrogant, or vindictive traits in others. However, actually, his attitude is divided.  He does abhor them but also secretly or openly adores them. And does so indiscriminately—without distinguishing between genuine self-confidence and hollow arrogance, between real strength and egocentric brutality. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

We easily understand that, chafing under his enforced humility, he adores in others aggressive qualities which he lacks or which are unavailable to him. However, gradually, we realize that this is not the complete explanation. We see that a more deeply hidden set of values, entirely opposite to the one just described, is also operating in him and that he admires in an aggressive type the expansive drives which for the sake of his integration he must so deeply suppress in himself. This disavowing of his own pride and aggressiveness, but admiring them in others, plays a great part in his morbid dependency. As the patient becomes strong enough to face his conflict, his expansive drives come into sharper focus. He should also have the absolute of fearlessness; he should also go all out for his advantage; he should be able to hit back at anybody who offends him. Accordingly, he despises himself at bottom for any trace of “cowardice,” of ineffectualness and compliance. He is thus under a constant crossfire. If he does something, he is damned, and if he does not, he is damned. If he refuses the request for a loan or for any favor, he feels that he is a repulsive and horrible creature; if he grants such requests, he feels that he is a “sucker.” If he puts the insulter in his place, he gets frightened and feels utterly unlikable. As long as he cannot face this conflict and work at it the need to keep a check on the aggressive undercurrents makes it all the more necessary to adhere tenaciously to the self-effacing pattern, and thereby enhances its rigidity. Such a man must be assumed to be in the throes of a conflict which probably made the idea of a marital commitment repugnant to the point of open panic. However, when he married twenty years later, having in the meantime taken the vows of celibacy, broken with the Church, set a fire to the world around him, publicly proclaiming as his first and foremost reason for taking a wife was that it would please his father. However, on July 2^nd, he was surprised by a severe thunderstorm. A bolt of lightning struck the ground near him, throwing him to the ground, and causing him to be seized by a severe, some say convulsive, state of terror. He felt, terrore et agonis mortis subitae circumvallatus: as if completely walled in by the painful fear of a sudden death. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23

Before he knew it, he was seeking help and wanted to renew his vows of celibacy. He felt bound by what he considered to be a vow and began to think of the experience as a frightful call from heaven: de caelo terroribus. Was this thunderstorm necessary? Some believe that it was God’s way of calling him away (abgerufen) from a glamorous career which the young man had every reason to desire. His psychiatrist assumes that the event was only the climax of an agitated depressive state which gradually had ruined the perspective of that career. A student of motivation cannot well ask what motivates God to do something extraordinary; yet he may wonder what in the world would at that moment call for an un-Aristotelian thunderstorm. The monastic profession was not an uncommon career; it was even a respectable way of becoming a scholar and of eventually rejoining academic work. This concern with the adequacy of established explanatory frameworks—whether theological, philosophical, or psychological—finds a parallel in the historical understanding of monastic vocation, which likewise resists simplistic or conventional interpretation. Transactional analysis as a therapeutic method is based on the assumption that words and gestures can have a therapeutic effect without any bodily contact with the patient beyond a handshake. If a transactional analyst considers that bodily contact is desirable for a certain patient, he refers him to a dance class, sensory-awareness group, or a “permission class” with a prescription for dancing. Permission classes are run as groups, so that the patient does not get individual hugging or individual dancing exercises. All the patients do the same things at the same time, but the teacher is aware of each one’s special needs and devotes some attention to them. (The patients do not have to do the same things at the same time. The teacher merely makes the suggestion, but each person is free to do as he wishes—that is part of the permission derived from the class. Usually, however, they enjoy the participation with other people, something they may have missed in childhood.) #RandolphHarris 6 of 23

Since permission is the decision intervention for script analysis, it is worth having as clear as possible an understanding of how it works, and every opportunity should be taken to learn about it by observing this in different situations. However, while therapeutic models can offer valuable explanations for experiences that appear extraordinary, it is equally important to recognize that many individuals interpret such moments through the lens of the divine calling. If one abuses the license and goes too far, he will hear from the authorities under ordinary circumstances. When there is a prohibition against doing something, a dialogue will result whenever the person starts to do it. Only a small part of the totality of human experiences is retained in consciousness. The experiences that are so retained become sedimented, that is, they congeal in recollection as recognizable and memorable entities. Unless such sedimentation took place, the individual could not make sense of his biography. Intersubjective sedimentation also takes place when several individuals share a common biography, experiences of which become incorporated in a common stock of knowledge. Intersubjective sedimentation can be called truly social only when it has been objectivated in a sign system of one kind or another, that is, when the possibility of reiterated objectivation of the shared experiences arise. Only then is it likely that these experiences will be transmitted from one generation to the next, and from one collectivity to another. Theoretically, common activity, without a sign system, could be the basis for transmission. Empirically, this is improbable. An objectively available sign system bestows a status of incipient anonymity on the sedimented experiences by detaching them from their original context of concrete individual biographies and making them generally available to all who share, or may share in the future, in the sign system in question. The experiences thus become readily transmittable. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23

It is often maintained that the neglect of a divine calling invites adverse consequences, for such disregard is understood as a refusal of grace. Numerous witnesses throughout the Christian tradition attest that the doctrine of divine grace and salvific purpose—articulated most fully in the Epistle to the Romans and commonly associated with the Calvinistic tradition—has impressed upon students the necessity of presenting themselves as approved before God, rightly dividing the word of truth. However, in times of change—and what other times are there, in our memory? One generation differs so much from another that items of tradition often become disturbances. Conflicts between the divine way and one’s own self-made style, conflicts between the expert’s authority and one’s own style may disturb God and show a lack of faith. Furthermore, all the mass transformations in American life (immigration, migration, and Americanization; industrialization, urbanization, mechanization, and others) are apt to disturb the divine way in those tasks which are so simple yet so far-reaching. No wonder, then, that Proverbs 3.5-6 says, “Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to Him, and He will make your paths straight.” Change, the true change is when eternity exists. Eternity is just than the earth and the world; for eternity there is a crown of honor laid aside for each of those that have in truth willed only one thing. So also with riches and power and the world that passes away and the lust thereof. The one who has willed either of them, even if he only willed one thing, must, to his own agony, continue to will it when it has passed, and learn by the agony of contradiction that it is not one thing. However, the one who in truth willed one thing and therefore willed the Good, even if he be sacrificed for it, why should he not go on willing the same in eternity, the same thing that he was willing to die for? Why should he not will the same, when it has triumphed in eternity? #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

To will one thing, therefore, cannot mean to will that which only appears to be one thing. The fact is that the worldly goal is not one thing in its essence because it is unreal. Its so-called unity is actually nothing but emptiness which is hidden beneath the manyness. In the short-lived moment of delusion, the worldly goal is therefore a multitude of things, and thus not one thing. So far is it from a state of being and remaining one thing, that in the next moment it changes itself into its opposite. Carried to its extreme limit, what is pleasure other than disgust? What is earthly honor at its dizzy pinnacle other than contempt for existence? What are riches, the highest superabundance of riches, other than poverty? For no matter how much all the earth’s gold hidden in covetousness may amount to, is it not infinitely less than the smallest mite hidden in the contentment of the poor! What is worldly omnipotence other than dependence? What slave in chains is as unfree as a tyrant! No, the worldly goal is not one thing. Diverse as it is, in life it is changed into its opposite, in death into nothing, in eternity into damnation: for the one who has willed this goal. Only the Good is the one thing in its essence and the same in each of its expressions. Take love as an illustration. The one who truly loves does not love once and for all. Nor does he use a part of his love, and then again another part. For to change it into small coins is not to use it rightly. No, he loves with all his love. It is wholly present in each expression. He continues to give it away as a whole, and yet he keeps it intact as a whole, in his heart. Wonderful riches! When the miser has gathered all the world’s gold in sordidness—then he has become poor. When the lover gives away his whole love, he keeps it entire—in the purity of the heart. Shall a man in truth will one thing, then this one thing that he wills must be such that it remains unaltered in all changes, so that by willing it, he can win immutability. If it changes continually, then he himself becomes changeable, double-minded, and unstable. And this continual change is nothing else than impurity. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

Such inner inconsistency does not remain an abstract defect; it manifests with particular clarity in the way individuals attempt to justify the volatility of their affections. Rarely will you find that a man whose love turns from one woman to another feels no need to legitimate this before himself by saying: she was not worthy of my love, or, she has disappointed me, or whatever other like “reasons” exist. This is an attitude that, with a profound lack of chivalry, adds a fancied “legitimacy” to the plain fact that he no longer loves her and that the woman must bear it. By virtue of this “legitimation,” the man claims a right for himself and besides causing the misfortune seeks to put her in the wrong. The successful amatory competitor proceeds exactly in the same way: namely, the opponent must be less worthy, otherwise he would not have lost out. It is not so different, of course, if, after a victorious war, the victor in undignified self-righteousness claims, “I have won because I was right.” Or, if somebody under the frightfulness of war collapses psychologically, and instead of simply saying it was just too much, he feels the need of legitimizing his war weariness to himself by substituting the feeling, “I could not bear it because I had to fight for a morally bad cause.” Likewise, with the defeated in war. Instead of searching like old women for the “guilty one” after the war—in a situation in which the structure of society produced the war—everyone with a manly and controlled attitude would tell the enemy, “We lost the war. You have won it. That is now all over. Now, let us discuss what conclusion must be drawn according to the objective interests that came into play, and what is the main thing in view of the responsibility toward the future which above all burdens the victor.” Anything else is undignified and will become a boomerang. If its interests have been damaged, a nation forgives. However, if its honor has been offended, especially by a bigoted self-righteousness, no nation forgives. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

Every new document that comes to light after decades revives the undignified lamentations, the hatred and scorn, instead of allowing the war at its end to be buried, at least morally. This is possible only through objectivity and chivalry, and above all, only through dignity. However, never is it possible through an “ethic,” which in truth signifies a lack of dignity on both sides. Instead of being concerned about what the politician is interested in, the future and the responsibility towards the future, this ethic is concerned about politically sterile questions of past guilt, which are not to be settled politically.  If such a guilt exists at all, to act in this way is politically guilty. And overlooks the unavoidable falsification of the whole problem, through very material interests: namely, the victor’s interest in the greatest possible moral and material gain; the hopes of the defeated to trade in advantages through the confessions of guilt. If anything is “vulgar,” then, this is, and it is the result of this fashion of exploiting “ethics” as a means of “being in the right.” More and more, revolution has found itself delivered into the hands of its bureaucrats and doctrines on the one hand, and to enfeebled and bewildered masses on the other. When the revolutionary elite are guillotined and when Telleyrand is left alive, who will oppose Bonaparte? However, to these historical reasons are added economic necessities. The passages by Simone Weil on the condition of the factory worker must be read in order to realize to what degree of moral exhaustion and silent despair the rationalization of labor can lead. Simone Weil is right in saying that the worker’s condition is doubly inhumane in that he is first deprived of money and then of dignity. Work in which one can have an interest, creative work, even though it is badly paid, does not degrade life. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

 Industrial socialism has done nothing essential to alleviate the condition of the workers because it has not touched on the very principle of production and the organization of labor, which, on the contrary, it has extolled. It even went so far as to offer the worker a historic justification of his lot of much the same value as a promise of celestial joys to one who works himself to death; never did it attempt to give him the joy of creation. The political form of society is no longer in question at this level, but the beliefs of a technical civilization on which capitalism and socialism are equally dependent. Any ideas that do not advance the solution of this problem hardly touch on the misfortunes of the worker. In a society marked by stagnant wages, the moral implications of economic inequality become increasingly difficult to ignore, particularly when viewed through traditions that emphasize justice, stewardship, and the dignity of labor. The root causes of recent labor unrest is to be found partly in causes which are worldwide, and affect all countries as well as ourselves, partly in cases which are special to our country and give differences, the fundamental differences, between the point of view of the present government on fiscal questions between the modern one-sided Free Trader and the Tariff Reformer? The modern Free Trader looks first and foremost only to the interests of the consumer. He says that all men are consumers, and therefore, he can leave other aspects of the great industrial problem to take care of themselves. Tariff Reformers on the other hand, say that our whole society, to a degree which has never been true of any other country in the world and is not even true today, depends upon the producer. Every man is a consumer; that is true. However, most men, directly or indirectly, are producers. All the rich must produce before they can consume. Production to them is a sine qua non of consumption, and unless they find scope for their industry, work for their hands or brains, the means of gaining a livelihood which they need, cheapness is a mockery and a sham. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

However, they also believe that our present system does not serve the interest of cheapness in what is most necessary for our people to have—cheap food and the raw materials of industry. They have said—and facts have shown that they are right, and they are entitled to point to it now to show that they are not mere prophets after the event—that if the Government persists in their policy of doing nothing, prices will rise. And they have risen. Prices of the necessities of life. Only one thing has not risen—the price of labor. The trouble in the midst of which they now live finds its root cause in the general rise in the necessaries of life, which is aggravated by the fact that in this country, that rise has been unaccompanied by an equivalent rise in the price of labor. The man who now draws the same wages as ten or twenty years ago finds that his position is not better whilst he looks for betterment, has not even remained the same, but that the pinch is sharpened, the struggle for life harder, the margin between him and real distress more narrow than ever it is in his experience before. What is the government doing? Some economists argue that tariffs can boost wages only when paired with strong unions or when they successfully expand domestic production. When tariffs reduce import pressure, domestic firms may expand production. More production leads to more hiring, and upward pressure on wages in that specific sector. This effect is strongest in manufacturing and heavy industry. As tariff revenue is reinvested in the American economy, it will generate more government revenue, pay down debt, increase private investment and production, which will increase wages over time. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

However, if nothing is done to protect American-made goods, and the American workers, low wages will deprive people of any chance or hope for decent existences, which perpetuates misery and breeds ill-health in the children before ever they come to face the struggle of life, they will do what they can to prevent that cancerous growth in their midst. In dealing as America has been dealing by giving away farm land, importing food and good and services, and poverty, they have been turning the pyramid upside down, and if they do not take care, and the people of this country do not take care, the whole weight of it will topple over and crush the masses of our people They cannot put all these new charges upon the industry, nearly all of them desirable, many of them most necessary, unless they give industry the support and the encouragement which is necessary to enable our industry to bear the fresh expenses. It is no good treating our commerce and our industry as existing in a watertight compartment of its own, unaffected by what goes on elsewhere in the world. The existing methods provide palliatives which might raise great hopes, and for a moment might seem to promise great results, but which, as they raise them upon an insecure foundation, we are bound in the long run to make their last step worse than the first. Unless and until they recognize that the necessity of national production, employment of our own people and our own capital, and the encouragement of industry and enterprise within our own boundaries is as much one of the chief tasks of Government, their labour will be fruitless and worse than fruitless. In trying to improve the conditions of workpeople, they will create more unemployment; in trying to raise wages without increasing production in America, they will decrease the amount of work going; in trying to better the condition of their people, they will lower it, because they are loading an industry that is already finding itself oppressed to the uttermost to maintain its position. We need tariffs to protect the American worker. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

America has become so expensive that record numbers of Americans are relocating to Mexico. According to the U.S. State Department, the number of American citizens living in Mexico increased by 75 percent between 2019 and 2025, reaching an estimated 1.8 million people. Many of these individuals work remotely for U.S. companies while taking advantage of Mexico’s lower cost of living, natural beauty, and vibrant culture—and they are thriving. California illustrates the severity of the affordability crisis anc corruption. Under Gavin Newsom’s controll, nearly $80 billion has been wasted and/or stolen. Also, California is now the third most expensive state in the nation and is facing a $20 billion budget deficit, reflecting the financial strain on its residents. In 37 percent of California counties, a family of four earning a six‑figure income is considered low‑income. The average home price in the state is approaching $1 million, while the average salary is just over $96,000—making homeownership unattainable for most Californians. The situation is even more stark for individuals. In five counties—Santa Cruz, Santa Clara, San Mateo, San Francisco, and Marin—a single person earning more than $100,000 a year is now classified as low‑income. Traditional mortgage guidelines recommend spending no more than 28 percent of gross income on a mortgage payment and no more than 36 percent on total debt. Based on the median household income in Sacramento County, a homeowner can afford a mortgage payment of about $2,070 per month, or up to $2,661 for all debts combined. Yet home prices in Sacramento County require far higher incomes. To purchase a typical home using standard lending guidelines, a household would need to earn roughly $135,000 per year. In reality, the median household income in Sacramento County is about $88,724—often with two to four people working to support the mortgage. This mismatch raises serious questions about how lenders are qualifying buyers for such expensive homes. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22

Home prices in Sacramento County are now rivaling those in the Bay Area, and in some cases, Bay Area homes are actually more affordable. Historically, the Bay Area has commanded higher prices due to higher‑paying jobs, a larger population, and its status as a major tourist destination. Sacramento’s rapid price escalation signals a deepening affordability crisis. According to this viewpoint, state leadership has contributed to the problem. Governor Gavin Newsom has directed taxpayer‑funded resources and cash aid toward individuals in the country illegally, while state workers—who keep California running—are overdue for a 25 percent wage increase. This prioritization, critics argue, worsens the affordability crisis and leaves California residents struggling to keep up with rising costs. Additionally, while California is facing one of the most severe affordable‑housing crises in the nation, yet at the same time the state has embarked on an extraordinarily expensive renovation of the Capitol building—known as “The Castle”—in Sacramento. According to public reports, the project has already cost taxpayers more than $1.2 billion, and some analysts estimate the final price could reach as high as $5 billion before completion. Classical buildings rely on stone or stone-like finishes. Modern additions often use concrete, glass, steel, or flat stucco, which can feel cheap or abrupt next to marble-like surfaces. Because the addition is bulkier, taller, or visually heavier, it overpowers the original architecture of the Ancient Greek and Roman design. Critics argue that Capitol buildings are not just architecture — they are civic symbols. When an addition does not “speak the same language,” people feel like the symbolism has been diluted, such unnecessary spending reflects deeper structural problems in the state’s governance. They point to decades‑old laws that restrict housing supply and discourage home sales, as well as concerns about bureaucratic inefficiency, corruption, and wasteful government spending. These factors, they contend, have contributed to soaring rents, limited housing availability, and a growing sense that state priorities are misaligned with the needs of ordinary Californians. The consequences of these policies are increasingly visible. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

Between 2018 and 2023, California received $24 billion to fund 30 homeless and housing programs. These programs produced 100,000 housing units—an average cost of $240,000 per unit. For comparison, Roger Lucas, owner of Grand Castle, LLC, spent $50 million to build The Grand Castle, a 522‑unit residential community in Grandville, Michigan. The development includes studios, one‑bedroom, two‑bedroom, and three‑bedroom units, as well as a multi‑level penthouse. Rents range from $1,000 to $2,500. Built on a 23.6‑acre site, the community features 750 covered parking spaces, a clubhouse, and a resort‑style pool, and was completed in just 12 to 18 months. The average cost per unit was approximately $95,785—about $144,000 less per unit than California’s publicly funded projects. California also has the highest unemployment rate in the nation at 5.4 percent, compared to the national average of 4.5 percent. As household bills surge and the minimum wage rises to $20 an hour, people living on Social Security retirement benefits are especially strained, with monthly checks effectively equating to $5 to $7 an hour. Meanwhile, as Americans struggle to find and afford housing, Governor Gavin Newsom signed two bills on February 7, 2025—SBX1 1 and SBX1 2, both part of the Budget Act of 2024—allocating $50 million to protect individuals in the country illegally from deportation. Additionally, the governor extended free health care to 700,000 undocumented immigrants, costing taxpayers $3 billion annually. At the same time, funding was reduced for programs serving veterans, schoolchildren, people with disabilities, and the homeless. Given these circumstances, it is understandable that many people who are legally in the United States—and paying between 30 and 90 percent of their income in taxes—are deeply frustrated. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

Advocates argue that the crisis unfolding in California—driven by Democratic policies—is pushing home prices, mortgages, and rents higher not only across the United States but around the world, making everyday life increasingly unaffordable. Many believe the situation is far from stabilizing. At the same time, China—where the United States has outsourced significant jobs and capital—has more than 50 ghost cities containing an estimated 65 million vacant homes. These ghost cities are the result of massive overdevelopment in areas where few or no people live. By contrast, if all categories of homelessness are counted, California is estimated to have as many as 4 million homeless individuals. The state also has the highest home prices in the nation, the highest taxes, and some of the most restrictive business regulations anywhere. Because of what critics describe as a hostile environment for both residents and employers, more than 360 companies have left California since 2020. Additionally, more than 500,000 residents leave the state each year because it has become too expensive to live in. Critics also point to Governor Gavin Newsom’s policies, including the criminalization of homelessness and the arrest of individuals without housing, rising crime, and widespread job losses as companies continue to move operations elsewhere. California also has the highest unemployment rate in the country at 5.4 percent, compared to the national average of 4.1 percent. Advocates argue that the crisis created by Democratic leadership is driving up housing costs nationwide and globally, and that the situation is far from resolved. California is also home to more than 3.5 million undocumented immigrants. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

America is facing a slow‑moving crisis that too few people are willing to confront: we are losing farmland at a pace that threatens our long‑term ability to feed ourselves. Much like the land shortage unfolding in Las Vegas—where rapid development has pushed the city to the edge of its buildable limits—we risk running out of the agricultural land that sustains our food supply. Once farmland is paved over, it is gone forever. And if we continue down this path, the consequences could be severe. Food security is national security. A nation that cannot grow its own food is a nation that must rely on others for survival. In a world already strained by geopolitical tensions, climate pressures, and supply‑chain disruptions, the idea of future “food wars” is not far‑fetched. Protecting American farmland today is an investment in tomorrow’s stability. One of the most effective ways to safeguard our agricultural base is to support the farmers and ranchers who keep it productive. That starts with buying American‑made beef, poultry, dairy, and produce. When consumers choose domestic products, they strengthen the economic foundation of rural communities. They also send a clear signal to investors: American agriculture is worth backing. The imbalances we saw in the past are exactly why President Trump implemented traffis: to protect American industries, reduce trade deficits, and prevent the United States from being taken advantage of economically. The goal, in this view, is to return America to the status of a creditor nation rather than one borrowing money to support other countries. According to this perspective, President Trump’s tariff policies generate approximately $400 billion in annual revenue and help create hundreds of thousands of jobs. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

When Americans shop locally, they do more than support their neighbors—they strengthen the national economy. Every dollar spent on American‑made goods circulates back into our communities, generating tax revenue that funds schools, infrastructure, and public services. It keeps jobs here at home, ensures wages rise naturally, and reduces the burden on taxpayers. In contrast, buying foreign goods often means lighter tax loads for overseas companies and money flowing out of our economy, strengthening other nations at our expense. There are environmental benefits too. American‑made products travel shorter distances, reducing carbon emissions. And unlike many foreign manufacturers, American companies are held to higher standards for pollution control. They must dispose of waste responsibly and protect our air, land, and water. Supporting them is not only patriotic—it’s environmentally responsible. Under President Trump’s administration, policies have emphasized prioritizing American workers and industries. Efforts to secure the border, reduce illegal crossings, and crack down on drug trafficking have been paired with significant investment in U.S. manufacturing, production, and innovation. These measures have helped channel trillions of dollars back into American industry, reinforcing the pledge to “Make America Great Again.” The lesson is clear: when we buy American, we invest in ourselves. We protect farmland, preserve jobs, reduce pollution, and strengthen our economy. We also reduce reliance on foreign nations and help lower the national debt by keeping tax revenue at home. The human intellect we possess today, so rich and capable, did not appear suddenly. It evolved through countless stages, shaped by experience, struggle, and the gradual awakening of self‑awareness.  And yet, for all our progress, something essential is missing. We have had scientific thinking, business thinking, and political thinking in abundance. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

What the world needs now is inspired thinking—thinking that rises above self‑interest and moves toward wisdom. The intellect may begin in selfishness, but its natural evolution leads toward reason, and ultimately toward selflessness. This is where parents play a vital role. Teach your children to love America, to appreciate the freedoms and opportunities they inherit, and to support the workers and businesses that keep this nation strong. Teach them to respect law and order, to honor their elders, and to understand that good character is the foundation of a meaningful life. It is inborn in the human mind to want to know. Curiosity begins with a child’s endless questions, deepens through a scientist’s investigations, and eventually reaches toward something higher—a union of reflective thought and intuitive insight. This is the beginning of true intelligence, the kind that seeks a view of the whole, not just the parts. When the mind reaches this stage, it enters the realm of philosophy. But too many children today are struggling in school, not because they lack ability, but because they are not reading. Reading is the gateway to thought. When you read books, you absorb the rhythm of language, the structure of ideas, and the example of how to express yourself. You learn to write, to think, and to understand the world beyond your immediate experience. So to every young person: take your education seriously. Read your books. Ask questions. Think deeply. The effort you put in now will shape the opportunities you have later. Your success will not only make your family proud—it will give you the tools to contribute meaningfully to your community and your country. The evolution of the mind is a lifelong journey. But it begins with simple habits: curiosity, discipline, respect, and a willingness to learn. These are the qualities that build strong individuals—and a strong nation. “Oh, thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand between their loved home and the war’s desolation! Blest with victory and peace, may the heav’n-rescued land Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation! Then conquer we must, when our cause is just, and this be our motto: ‘In God is our trust.’ And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.” #RandolphHarris 21 of 21

Loving God, I lift the relationships in my life that are filled with tension and discord to You. Pour out your peace on those involved, softening hearts and fostering understanding. May your love guide our words and actions, bringing reconciliation and harmony. Grant us the wisdom to forgive and the humility to seek peace. In Jesus’ name, I pray. Amen.